The purchase values the world’s largest professional networking site at US$196 per share, with the all-cash transaction is being financed primarily by new debt. Microsoft’s market capitalization is about US$400 billion.

The deal puts a 50 per cent premium on LinkedIn’s Friday closing price of US$131. The stock had last traded above US$190 in February of this year. LinkedIn closed Monday at US$192.21, up 46 per cent.

For Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft, the deal is not only a window into a company with growth, it’s an opportunity to market its products and software to a massive base of professionals and potential customers.

In an e-mail to the company’s employees, CEO Satya Nadella acknowledged Microsoft’s goal to bring together “information in LinkedIn’s public network with the information in Office 365 and Dynamics.”

Office 365 is the company’s online suite of workplace software applications; Dynamics is its line of business management software applications.

LinkedIn, based in Mountain View, Calif., will retain a distinct brand, culture and independence, according to Microsoft, and its current CEO Jeff Weiner will remain in his role. However, in his e-mail to employees Nadella said that LinkedIn will be partnering on product integration plans with the Office 365 and Dynamics teams.

As an example, Nadella said the integration of LinkedIn’s newsfeed with Microsoft products could allow the website to serve up articles-based projects that users are working on in Office.

While the business side of the deal is good for investors and for Microsoft, some of the professional network’s loyal users heaped scorn on the move.

One LinkedIn user, Phil Thomson, told Reuters he would no longer use the networking site. “I regret to inform all my connections that I will no longer be accepting invitations or messages on LinkedIn, due to its sale to Microsoft,” wrote Thomson.

Users of LinkedIn may have to consider security issues, said a leading privacy expert.

“There’s always a concern any time there’s an ownership change for an entity with a lot of sensitive personal information like what LinkedIn controls,” said Vivek Krishnamurthy, who teaches at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic. “While LinkedIn is known for controlling information that’s in a semi-public sphere, in particular its professional profiles, it also houses private messages and job applications are made on the website. Its information could include the fact that you’re seeking a job while you’re presumably employed or were employed somewhere else.”

Microsoft was previously found to have given U.S. Intelligence services access to e-mails and web chats on its Outlook.com portal, as well as to audio and video of Skype calls. Earlier this year, however, it supported Apple in battle with the FBI over the iPhone decryption key.

“Pretty much every tech company has a mixed record,” said Krishnamurthy. “My general feeling is Silicon Valley is doing a better job protecting against the government. The interesting flip side is what they do with the data they store for commercial purposes, which is unregulated in the United States where these companies are based. That’s the great unknown.”

Microsoft has a mixed track record with acquisitions, having written off more than $10 billion it poured into companies such as cellphone maker Nokia and an online ad firm called aQuantive. Nadella expressed confidence that this one will succeed, citing the company’s more successful takeovers of Skype and Minecraft.

]]>http://business.financialpost.com/technology/microsoft-corp-buys-linkedin-for-26-2-billion/feed0linkedinsdbcraigFP Watchlist: Microsoft buying LinkedIn, Brexit risk rises, Fed on jobshttp://business.financialpost.com/investing/investing-pro/fp-watchlist-microsoft-buying-linkedin-brexit-risk-rises-fed-on-jobs
http://business.financialpost.com/investing/investing-pro/fp-watchlist-microsoft-buying-linkedin-brexit-risk-rises-fed-on-jobs#respondMon, 13 Jun 2016 16:20:08 +0000http://business.financialpost.com/?p=668899The world’s biggest software company is paying more than US$26 billion for a virtual Rolodex of connected business professionals, the threat of the U.K. leaving the European Union appears to once again be meaningful risk, and the FOMC may be wondering how low it can go with its unemployment forecast. The Financial Post’s Jonathan Ratner looks at some of the day’s top business and financial stories.
]]>http://business.financialpost.com/investing/investing-pro/fp-watchlist-microsoft-buying-linkedin-brexit-risk-rises-fed-on-jobs/feed00504jonathanratnerJonathan RatnerLinkedIn declares ‘responsible’ the most overused profile buzzword of 2013http://business.financialpost.com/technology/linkedin-declares-responsible-the-most-overused-profile-buzzword-of-2013
http://business.financialpost.com/technology/linkedin-declares-responsible-the-most-overused-profile-buzzword-of-2013#respondWed, 11 Dec 2013 08:01:32 +0000http://business.financialpost.com/?p=395955If you’re a responsible and effective analytical expert, who is positive their strategic skills can help skirt organizational gridlock and specializes in producing innovative and dynamic creative, then congratulations, you have just used every single one of the Top 10 most overused buzzwords on LinkedIn this year.

On Wednesday, LinkedIn Corp. unveiled its annual list of the most commonly overused buzzwords and phrases on its professional social network, with the word ‘responsible’ topping the list this year. Responsible topped the most overused list in both Canada, and internationally.

‘Creative’ has seen its star fall over the last few years. The word ‘creative’ was the top buzzword in Canada and internationally each of the last two years, only to fall to No. 4 this year. Before that, “extensive experience” was the most overused word on the profiles of LinkedIn users, who now number nearly 260 million around the world.

It’s been more than a year-and-a-half since the social network for job seekers, recruiters and business professionals has overhauled its mobile offerings, and on Thursday, the Mountain View, California-based company plans to put a new face on its mobile properties.

A new, redesigned LinkedIn app for Android phones and iPhones is now available – and as Joss Redfern, LinkedIn’s mobile product head puts it, they’re starting to “mainstream the base.”

When Mr. Redfern joined LinkedIn in 2011, only about 8% of unique users were visiting the social network via mobile apps each week. That number has now reached 27% – and 15% of new sign-ups come from the company’s applications.

With a new, more functional app that caters to more than just the “outbound professional” he hopes that those numbers will only continue to climb.

The old app, said LinkedIn’s mobile product lead Tomer Cohen, hadn’t really changed all that much since it was released. Not only had it lost some of its lustre, but there was “too much friction in the current app to getting things done.”

The solution, Mr. Cohen said, was to put everything important about the LinkedIn experience just a single tap away – bringing the experience to the user, instead of making the user search out features.

Since the typical user spends just two minutes in an app, Mr. Cohen said, simple navigation is key. Now, there is a sliding drawer on the left-hand side of the app that houses common LinkedIn shortcuts – a popular recent design paradigm on mobile – and a redesigned story stream.

The team has obviously taken some cues from Facebook’s own timeline with the latter, and LinkedIn updates, posts, profiles and links now feed into a single unified view.

Users can like, comment, and even add connections and join groups without leaving the stream, and it’s an attempt, said Mr. Cohen, to remove the myriad layers, those two or three extra taps, that needlessly complicated simple tasks before.

There’s also an element of personalization taking place, and the stream is smart about balancing items that are both recent and relevant – in other words, a combination of the most timely and professional insights in a given user’s stream.

“If you’re that type of user that comes twice a week, or you come four times a day, the app is still going to be super useful to you.” Mr. Cohen said.

In one example offered by Mr. Redfern, “The algorithm behind the stream itself is always looking for signals to see if you’re in job seeking mode or not.”

But the new apps involve more than just a fresh coat of paint – there are behind the scenes changes too – and compared to LinkedIn’s previous mobile efforts, it’s interesting to see the pendulum, so to speak, swing back.

While LinkedIn once wholly endorsed HTML5 for mobile development, the team is gravitating back to so-called native code, developing applications specifically designed for individual smartphone platforms.

“As you know we’ve been really big proponents of HTMl5, love the tech and contiue to use it,” said Mr. Redfern. But with the most recent redesign, “we started to move more and more of that code back to native.”

In the past, the split between native code and HTML5 would have been 40/60.

LinkedIn Corp. said Wednesday that it now has 200 million members globally.

Co-founder Reid Hoffman first started the social network for professionals and job seekers in his living room in 2002.

It gained some decent traction in its first month, attracting 4,500 members, and by 2011, the site had more than 100 million registered users.

According to a 2012 LinkedIn statistics presentation published by Amodiovalerio Verde, product director at Contactlab, the company has grown 45% since the same time last year. Canada alone has more than seven million users.

If you’re new to the site, fret not. Once registered, you build a profile and an online resume. You then begin to build your professional network, much in the same way users of Facebook build their social networks of friends.

But try to avoid using commonly found key words such as creative, effective and highly organized.

But if you’re looking to stand out without putting too much thought into things, don’t despair, it seems “thought leader” still isn’t off limits.

Here’s the Canadian ranking of most overused words/terms for 2012:

Creative

Effective

Organizational

Motivated

Analytical

Interpersonal

Problem solving

Extensive experience

Innovative

Communication skills

To come up with the list, LinkedIn aggregated the adjectives in the “summary” section of public profiles. It removed overused words like “mobile” and other irrelevant words and sorted the resulting list of words by frequency, it said.

LinkedIn published a blog post on globally popular buzzwords as well as the U.S. list here.

]]>http://business.financialpost.com/executive/careers/top-10-most-overused-words-on-linkedin-profiles-for-2012/feed0LinkedInchristinedobbyAre ‘friendships’ the next business strategy?http://business.financialpost.com/executive/careers/are-friendships-the-next-business-strategy
http://business.financialpost.com/executive/careers/are-friendships-the-next-business-strategy#respondThu, 25 Oct 2012 17:45:10 +0000http://business.financialpost.com/?p=243230If you have 347 followers on Twitter, what are the chances that they’ll click on the same online ad you clicked on last night? Are firms trying to capitalize on the social media explosion to market their business in a big way?

These are the kind of questions that advertisers and researchers at MIT and IBM are dying to know the answer to, Stephen Baker writes in an article in BusinessWeek. And Jeffrey Rayport, formerly of Harvard Business School, reports in an article inBusinessWeek, that a shift is underway that is ushering in the next stage in the battle for influence on the Web, which involves companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others. This battle will change the way we use the Internet and how advertising is used. Rayport sees the capability of people taking their social identity from site to site, which means Web companies are no longer in the business of building “destination sites,”, but rather, social networking players are racing to extend their influence over the entire Web by exporting their social features to all sites. We may even see Google’s cited mission “to organize the world’s information” change to “organize the world’s people.”

Friendships have changed drastically, particularly among Generations X and Y, because of the technological tools of social networking sites. The really successful networkers combine face-to-face relationships with the online connections such as Facebook and LinkedIn, to keep the network of friends and business connections alive.

Many companies now are realizing the goldmine of marketing and promotion that exists and are using social networking to their advantage, which may in turn could sound the death knell for traditional advertising. Other companies, such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM are examining employee relationships inside the companies with the intent to improve communication and knowledge.

A third area of social networking — of personal opportunity — is an important development. Entrepreneurs, employee recruiters and career managers realize the power of social networking, using it to create business opportunities and recruit talent.

In essence, we are witnessing a great social and technological experiment in which millions of people around the globe are working and socializing in oceans of data. And advertisers are now realizing they can understand better people’s attitudes, preferences and psychology by studying social networking sites. Of course this massive amount of information produced by social networking sites is not all good, and much of it can be inaccurate, irrelevant or just plain boring. So the issue of information literacy rises to the fore — that being the ability of people to access, assess and use information wisely from the Internet, including social networking sites, in an intelligent manner.

So where do we get the best information? From our friends, maybe the only trusted source? Friendship data promises insights into not only the marketplace but also corporations. Researchers now can trace the hidden networks, identifying both the people who transmit valuable information and those who may actually block it, and how people can bypass them. Some companies now study their internal networks, and actually suggest friends to employees, much the same as a networker might arrange a personal luncheon between two strangers for mutual benefit.

For managers and executives who have launched themselves into using social networks for business purposes, the challenge becomes how to interpret friendship data and how to manage these networks and fit them into employee careers.

There is no question that the value in online friendships for both businesses and individuals alike is poised to grow and be used for purposes beyond what we can now imagine.

Ray Williams is President of Ray Williams Associates, a company based in Vancouver, providing leadership training and executive coaching services. He can be reached at ray@raywilliamsassociates.com and you can follow him on Twitter: @raybwilliams

Sales rose 89% to US$228.2-million, topping the US$216.5-million average analyst, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Net income fell to US$2.81-million, or 3 cents a share, from $4.51 million, or 4 cents, a year earlier, the company said in a statement. Profit excluding some items was 16 cents, matching estimates.

Chief Executive Officer Jeff Weiner has added members and increased sales from hiring services, the largest of his company’s three revenue lines. The first in a wave of social media companies to hold recent initial share sales, LinkedIn has outperformed Facebook Inc. and Zynga Inc. because of consistent results, said Herman Leung, an analyst at Susquehanna Financial Group.

“LinkedIn is a very different animal from those companies because they have been executing very well the past three quarters,” Leung said in an interview. “LinkedIn continues to be a market share gainer.”

[np-related]

The Shares of Mountain View, California-based LinkedIn rose in extended trading. Earlier, the stock fell 2.2% to US$93.51 at the close in New York. The stock has increased 48% this year.

Costs soared 93% to US$214.7-million. Sales and marketing more than doubled to US$75.7-million.

Revenue in the current period will be US$235-million to US$240-million, LinkedIn said. The company raised its full year 2012 sales forecast to US$915-million to US$925-million from a range of US$880-million to US$900-million provided in May.

Last month, LinkedIn revamped its home page to highlight the activities of a member’s professional connections, including what articles they have read and what changes they have made to their work profiles.

Facebook and Zynga have both declined after reporting second-quarter results that disappointed investors. Facebook, down 47% since its May IPO, is struggling to accelerate sales growth, while Zynga, down 73% since its December share sale saw a drop in demand for virtual goods.

]]>http://business.financialpost.com/technology/linkedin-posts-better-than-expected-revenue-raises-outlook/feed0Social networking company LinkedIn raised its full-year revenue forecast to a range of US$915-million to US$925-million from US$880-million to US$900-million.Bloomberg NewsLinkedIn ups online security after password security breachhttp://business.financialpost.com/technology/linkedin-ups-online-security-after-password-security-breach
http://business.financialpost.com/technology/linkedin-ups-online-security-after-password-security-breach#respondWed, 13 Jun 2012 15:47:12 +0000http://business.financialpost.com/?p=184695Social networking website LinkedIn Corp. said it will provide an additional layer of online security to its members following last week’s data breach, while adding that stolen passwords were not published with corresponding email logins.

Some cyber security experts had earlier said LinkedIn did not have adequate protections in place, and warned that the company could uncover further data-losses over coming days as it tries to find out what happened.[np-related]

Late on Tuesday, the company said all member passwords were now “salted” — a technique that greatly increases the time and computer power needed to crack an encrypted password.

The company, which has more than 160 million members on its site, said there had been no reports of accounts compromised by password theft.

]]>http://business.financialpost.com/technology/linkedin-ups-online-security-after-password-security-breach/feed0LINKEDINReutersLinkedIn, eHarmony password breaches highlight Web’s weak linkhttp://business.financialpost.com/technology/linkedin-eharmony-password-breaches-highlight-webs-weak-link
http://business.financialpost.com/technology/linkedin-eharmony-password-breaches-highlight-webs-weak-link#commentsFri, 08 Jun 2012 22:50:16 +0000http://business.financialpost.com/?p=183590Back in 2007, a Microsoft study said the average user has 6.5 passwords. Five years later, with more than two billion people now estimated to be using the Internet — and with the rise of the iPhone, iPad and social media — that’s at the very least 13 billion passwords out there.

‘There are so many articles about best practices for passwords. But intrinsically you’ve got a problem’

And many of them are way too weak, computer experts say.

Their advice is familiar and mind-boggling to most: pick an unrelated combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, symbols and numbers. It should be lengthy and impossible to guess but you’ll also have to memorize it because you can’t write it down. Once you’ve committed that password to memory, come up with a few dozen more because you can’t reuse it. Every few months, change them all.

Security experts reminded the public of these password best practices this week after LinkedIn and eHarmony both confirmed that millions of their users’ passwords were compromised.

But the tips may be falling on deaf ears.

Security firm Sophos Ltd. compared the leaked LinkedIn passwords against a list of commonly used passwords it recommends against — ‘pass123,’‘1234567890,’ and ‘qwerty’ for example — and found incidences of all but two of the verboten passwords in the list of those that were leaked.

“I think people are frustrated and there are very few people who follow all the password rules any more,” said Lorrie Faith Cranor, associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.

“We’ve found that an awful lot of people use the same password for multiple places or they write down their passwords,” Ms. Cranor said — both security faux pas.

[np-related]

Confronted by onerous instructions, she said, users often “give up and create a really weak password.”

In a recent study of passwords from 70 million Yahoo! users, Joseph Bonneau of the University of Cambridge found that different language groups “choose the same weak passwords” and “every identifiable group of users generated a comparably weak password distribution.”

People may not care if a hacker reads their LinkedIn messages, but if they’ve used the same password for multiple sites, it could create a domino effect and lead to a breach of more personal or financial accounts or even impersonation.

While strong passwords may be critical for protecting users’ personal information, some of the myriad sites people are logging into may prioritize ease of access over perfect security.

“We also find that if there are companies that have a direct interest in getting your money, they tend to have easier requirements,” Ms. Cranor said.

“If financial information is at stake, you’d expect to have a stronger password, but actually, the more the company wants to interact with the users, the more likely they’ll have a weaker password.”

Network security firms have an obvious interest in recommending sites take steps to shore up their cyber defences but with breaches becoming increasingly common, it does raise the issue of how much responsibility users themselves should bear.

‘We also find that if there are companies that have a direct interest in getting your money, they tend to have easier requirements’

“There are so many articles about best practices for passwords,” said Edward Roberts, vice-president of Mykonos Software, a web security firm owned by U.S. networking equipment maker Juniper Networks. “But intrinsically you’ve got a problem — everyone’s rushed to put up these websites and have user names and logins, but how are they protecting them?”

LinkedIn said 6.5 million “hashed” or encrypted passwords were posted on a hacker site and while eHarmony did not disclose a number, reports said the hashes of about 1.5 million passwords were uploaded to the web. In the aftermath, LinkedIn said in a blog post that passwords are now “salted as well as hashed,” which involves adding a string to passwords before they are hashed for an added layer of security.

The dating website stated that it uses “robust security measures” including password hashing and data encryption and also protects its networks with firewalls among other things.Apart from sites that collect user information adding more security features, some are looking into new ways to increase safety related to the user proving they are who they claim to be.

Greg Wolfond’s company, Toronto-based SecureKey Technologies Inc., has developed solutions based on dual-factor authentication that require users to login from known devices such as their home computers or mobile phones.

“We really want to know the right user is at the end of the wire,” he said.

Ms. Cranor said while there is a trend in that direction, like complex passwords, two-factor authentication can also be met with user resistance.

Another option is to use one account — ideally one to which a user has assigned a secure password — to sign into other accounts, something that is increasingly common with Facebook for example.

“We’re moving more towards this single sign-on approach and I think that going forward, that may be a way that kind of helps us out of this mess a bit,” Ms. Cranor said.